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Michael Fergus McGrath
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The Last of the Mohicans
James Fenimore Cooper
James Mustich
In the pages of this classic adventure tale you’ll meet one of the greatest heroes in American literature, Nathaniel Bumppo, a rugged scout and woodsman who goes by any number of nicknames, among them Natty, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, and Hawkeye. The Last of the Mohicans is the second...show more
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Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Inspired by the real-life experience of Alexander Selkirk (1676–1721), a Scottish sailor who was marooned for more than four years on a South Pacific island, Robinson Crusoe gave enduring form to fundamental themes of the Western imagination. With his parrot and parasol, the castaway Crusoe is an e...show more
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll
More than the sum of its parts, Lewis Carroll’s Alice oeuvre has taken root in our collective imagination like few other literary creations. Despite—or perhaps because of—its nonsensical pedigree, it has proved to be an addictive pleasure for analysts seduced by its dense mix of childish frivolities...show more
Foundation: The Foundation Trilogy, Book 1
Isaac Asimov
As a writer, Isaac Asimov’s reputation rests solidly on his ambitious Foundation Trilogy, which was awarded a special Hugo Award in 1966 as best science fiction series of all time. And although he would bow to fan pressure and resume the franchise nearly thirty years after publishing its initial ins...show more
Peter Pan and Wendy
J. M. Barrie
Despite your familiarity with the outline of the tale, a reading of the novel Peter Pan and Wendy is likely to astonish you with its sophistication, allusiveness, and compelling, yet paradoxically reflective, storytelling. For all its fantasy and adventure, the book is very much written from an adul...show more
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Though its plot may be less intricate than those of Austen’s earlier works, Persuasion is a captivating tale, and Anne Elliott is one of her most enduring creations. The last novel Austen wrote in her short life, it points toward an expansion of her extraordinary talents; in the pages of Persuasion,...show more
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
The best introduction to Austen’s work is surely the second of the six novels she wrote before her death at only forty-one, Pride and Prejudice, in which she introduces us to Elizabeth Bennet, the wittiest and most vivacious of five sisters on the hunt—if their mother has her way, at least—for husba...show more
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Austen’s first published novel, which appeared under the pseudonym “A Lady,” is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, and of the tension between private passions and public decorum. This is Austen’s most social novel, and in both town and country, she depicts a privileged class rif...show more
The Bible
In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis—in just thirty-one short verses—the world is given form, light is summoned into being, Day and Night are named, Heaven hatched, the stars invoked, and Earth fashioned into land and sea, seeded with plants and populated with creatures. All in less than eigh...show more
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett may have invented the hardboiled detective story, but nobody wrote it better than Raymond Chandler. With his stylized prose and flair for similes, he gave his detective Philip Marlowe a voice that would become the hallmark of the genre. Marlowe is the protagonist in all of Chandler’...show more
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
While the success of the Sherlock Holmes tales can properly be seen as a catalyst for the boom in crime and detective literature that began in the early twentieth century and seems to grow larger every year, the pleasure of Arthur Conan Doyle’s narratives rests only in part on the cleverly contrived...show more
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
One Soviet writer has no shortage of admirers today: Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novel The Master and Margarita has become both a Russian phenomenon and cult classic in the West. At once a love story, a supernatural adventure, and a vicious satire of the USSR under Stalin, it bursts with a creative ener...show more
Madeline
Ludwig Bemelmans
In this first of seven Madeline tales written and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans, our heroine, a French charmer whose special blend of moxie and mischief wins the hearts of all who meet her, proves her mettle. Madeline and her world— including Pepito (the boy next door), the dog Genevieve, Miss Cla...show more
The Uncommon Reader
Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett’s charming and wryly hilarious celebration of the pleasures and powers of reading is a flawlessly pitched, perfectly proportioned novella. Its heroine is the Queen of England, who one day finds herself, while chasing an errant Corgi, wandering into the mobile library parked outside of B...show more
The Complete Poems, 1927–1979
Elizabeth Bishop
Wow not included? I missed that and for me she is essential, not "lost".
Independent Spirit
Hubert Butler
A native of Kilkenny, the Anglo-Irish Butler was a chronicler of local culture, an amateur archaeologist, an astute student of Irish history and politics, a traveler and peripatetic conscience observing the tragedy of life in Central Europe in the abysmal middle of the last century. He was also a ma...show more
Possession
A. S. Byatt
A feast of literary and storytelling invention, Possession is mysterious, layered, romantic, suspenseful—and nearly impossible to put down. It’s hard to imagine that, before this novel won the Booker Prize and became an international bestseller in 1990, the author was working largely in the shadow o...show more
Lord of Light
Roger Zelazny
I would select a group of Zelazny's books, creatures, Isle, short stories, Amber. He is a unique talent and way beyond the norm. There is the occasional infelicitous language but his heart is fine.
The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics
Bernard Knox
This is a wonderful book which never leaves my close by collection.
Goodnight Moon
Margaret Wise Brown, pictures by Clement Hurd
As the pages are turned and the simplest of poems unfolds in casually rhymed lines, pictures of the cow jumping over the moon and of the three little bears are given their due, as are kittens and mittens and toyhouse and mouse, and the quiet old lady in the rocking chair whispering “hush.” The conte...show more